The depressing reality of the world economy in one chart

The world economy has been letting us down for years, and there’s a lot of blame to go around.

The disappointing reality was laid out in a chart from Macquarie that compared the actual gross-domestic-product growth from 2011 to 2016 with the five-year outlook from the International Monetary Fund. The world undershot growth expectations by 9 percentage points, growing 22% over the time frame instead of 31% as projected.

The letdown was widespread, with regions as varied as the eurozone and India contributing to the shortfall in world GDP. The biggest shortfall (outside the catchall “Rest of world”) in terms of total growth has been China, while the largest in terms of percentage growth was the 29-point miss by Brazil.

While the disappointment can probably be blamed in part on poor prognosticating by the IMF – its global GDP growth chart is a fishhook collection of economic sadness – it also speaks to how many maladies have befallen the world’s economy since the global financial crisis.